Kant: It Is Never Permissible To Lie

One of Kant’s more controversial cases in which he stuck to the idea that lying would be wrong is that of the murderer at the door. If some murderer set on killing your roommate were to come to your door and ask

Common sense seems to dictate that truths are always better than lies. In his lecture “A Lesson in Lying,” Michael Sandel discusses the categorical duty to tell the truth. He illustrates German philosopher, Immanuel Kant’s rigorous theory of morality, which allowed for no exceptions. “Kant believed that telling a lie, even a white lie, was a violation of one's own dignity.” Sandel experiments Kant's theory with his vigorous hypothetical scenario, The Killer at Your Door: “If your friend were hiding inside your home and a person intent on killing him came to your door and asked you where he was, would it be wrong to tell a lie?”

Honesty; a responsibility crowned upon each person. In any circumstances, lying is never necessary nor acceptable. There are many pieces of evidence to support this claim in the articles “Rejecting All Lies: Immanuel Kant” by Sissela Bok and “Brad Blanton: Honestly, Tell the Truth” by Barbara Ballinger. Unlike honesty, lying harms one’s worth and mental state.

Lying the one form of communication that is the untruth expressed to be the truth. Immanuel Kant states that lying is morally wrong in all possible ways. His hatred for lying has made him “just assumed that anyone who lied would be operating with a maxim like this: tell a lie so as to gain some benefit.”(Landau,pp.171) This is true for a vast number of people, they will lie in order to gain a certain benefit from the lie rather than the truth.It is similar to if you play a game of truth or dare, some rather pick a dare because it would release them from having to tell the truth. However, those who do pick truth still have a chance to lie to cover up the absolute truth.People lie in order to cover who they truly are. Even if you lie to benefit someone or something else, it would not matter to Kant because he does not care for the consequences. If you lie but have a good intention it is not the same for Kant, he would argue that you still lied no matter the consequence that a lie is a lie. “ While lying, we accuse others for not being transparent. While being hypocrites ourselves, we expect others to be sincere.” (Dehghani,Ethics) We know how it feels to be lied to by a person, so in order to not have the feeling returned, we hope the person will be truthful. We rather be surrounded by truthful people constantly despite all the lies that some people tell. No

Kant gives an example for why lying is not a right action. He states that there is a man who needs money even though he knows he will not be able to pay it back, his maxim is “’I will borrow money and promise to pay it back, though I know that this will never be done’” (Kant 534). Kant explains that this maxim would not work as a universal law because every banker would not believe someone who says they are going to pay money back, therefore would never give out any loads. He goes on to explain how people should treat each other. He argues that it is not acceptable to treat someone as “a merely as a means but “at the same time as an ends” (Kant 536). He says that to treat someone as a merely a means is to treat them merely as a machine in ones plan and involving them without their ability to consent. He argued that people needed to be treated as an ends meaning that people needed to be able to enter agreements of their own free will and without manipulation (Kant 537). Kant believed that treating people merely as a means was without good will and therefore could never produce a right action.

When I briefly studied Kant in college, it made me furious because Kant says lying is always unacceptable and impermissible. Which means this would happen:

Isabella lopez 8/15 core 2 when is lying okay? Lies are told everyday but its hard to tell exactly when lying is ok? For example in the excerpt “rejecting all lies” written by immanuel kant, kant believes lying is never ok and no one should ever lie and “ truthfulness is a duty which no circumstances can put aside.” Equally important in the excerpt “Brad Blanton: honestly, Tell the Truth” by Barbara Ballinger,Brad Blanton expresses his opinion on lying and how we believes it is almost never ok.

According to Kantian theory it would be wrong to lie, even to save a life or lives. The Kantian theory strongly affirms absolutes. Morality is based on freewill according the Immanuel Kant, moral worth comes from acting from duty. Good will means acting from duty, acting from reason and that our reason for action could apply to everyone. So it would be difficult for one to lie even for a good reason.

The primary categorical imperative that her telling a lie would violate would be the Formula of Universal Law. According the this imperative, we must “never to act on a maxim that we could not at the same time will to be a universal law” (Korsgaard 328). As our society generally believes lying to be wrong, lying violates the Formula of Universal Law because it is a maxim that is not a universal law. It cannot be said that lying is okay in every situation and could be applied universally, therefore we must conclude, according to Kant, that lying is in violation of the Formula of Universal Law. There are, of course, exceptions to this imperative. According to Christine Korsgaard, one can lie to those who intend to deceive us

Lying is defined as misleading someone deliberately. The philosopher Kant believed that lying is always morally wrong. He believes that it is not just wrong telling a lie, but a person is more immoral because they are corrupting the capacity of a human. He also believes that this prevents others to act rationally, because lies undermine the dignity of others.

According to Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, lying is acceptable in not even one situation you can think of. He specifically states,”Truthfulness in statements which cannot be avoided is the formal duty of an individual to everyone, however great may be the disadvantage” (Bok 1). This is so important because it really elaborates on how religiously one should avoid

Lying is ok because it maintains your image.In paragraph nine it says that moral philosopher would disagree that all lies are bad but Randy Cohen says i'm a big fan of lying.Lying is not always justified it is a moral duty we lie without even thinking about lying.We lie to maintain our image so people won’t think bad of us or be hating because if we always say the truth people might get

Lying in it is nature is done either to avoid hurting someone or hurting a person’s own self-image. Lying is at odds with making an unbiased choice. Lying is done to help one side or another in some course of action. If we look at elections for public office this plays out in the large scale. This as plagued the political system to the point were no one trust what a person says when they run for office. We all automatically assume the person running has to being lying because they are running for public office. This is in direct opposition to Kant’s categorical imperative by having people make a decision that is based on a moral or ethical statement. Keeping with politics as an example, does it really matter that lying violates Kant’s categorical imperative? Yes, it really does. If we applied Kant’s categorical imperative to politics where no one running for public office would lie to gain the office or to keep the office. There would be a huge amount of trust in our government. Our government would have people in there with an amount of trust to actually do action because of public support. Now if we apply the benefits of

mislead. For example when the then king told Kant that he could not write about

Kant unequivocally trusted that any kind of lying with a specific end goal to advantage oneself in any capacity wasn't right. He withheld a perspective, The Formula of Universal Law, which can be isolated into three sections: Formulate the adage of the activity, that is, make sense of what general rule you would follow up on if you somehow managed to perform the activity. Universalize the saying and plan it not as an individual strategy but rather as a standard for everybody. Also, in conclusion, figure out if the universalized proverb could be an all inclusive law, that is, whether it is workable for everybody to go about as the universalized saying requires.